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Lena has a plan.
It’s a good plan. Much better than her previous plan to reveal Kara’s secret to the world. That would’ve only caused chaos and strife and she would’ve felt terribly guilty about it all and then she would’ve been the one who ended up apologizing. No, this plan is much better. The only thing that will get hurt is Kara’s heart. Which is completely fair play, because Kara hurt Lena’s heart first.
It was the Pulitzer ceremony, actually, that inspired her plan. She’d given her speech, briefly overtaken by an irrational urge to forgive Kara for the unforgivable, and then had clutched Kara’s arms and looked in her eyes, and it was precisely that intensely emotional and vaguely homoerotic moment that had given her the idea.
Now all she has to do is make Kara fall in love with her.
She starts putting her plan into motion on a Monday. Kara lands on her office balcony and waltzes in carrying five (!) bags of pastries.
“I can’t possibly eat all of those,” says Lena, greeting her treacherous enemy with a hug of deception.
“I know,” says Kara, giving her a teasing smile. “They’re for me.”
Right. Because she has a metabolism far beyond what Lena can probably even imagine. Because she’s Kryptonian. Because she’s Supergirl.
Lena smiles, wide and fake. “Well, then, bon appetit,” she says, carefully selecting a danish and biting into it while Kara digs into her allotted pastries with aplomb.
As Kara eats, Lena eyes her from across her desk for a few minutes before casually remarking, “You know, you and I should go on a date.”
Kara nearly chokes on the bearclaw she was in the middle of inhaling. Lena almost feels bad, except that Kara didn’t really choke and anyway she’s a liar and a manipulator and a deceiver so who would care if she did? Not Lena, that’s who.
“A date?” Kara stammers out.
“That is what I said,” Lena says mildly. She figures it’s best to let Kara talk herself into this one. Kara, Lena has observed, is truly excellent at talking herself into things.
“Well,” says Kara, “I suppose – I mean, you know everything now.”
Lena nods pleasantly, as if it doesn’t bother her in the slightest that she didn’t know everything until a very short while ago even though she really, really should have.
“And, I mean,” says Kara, “you’re obviously very…um…attractive.” She clears her throat.
“Oh,” says Lena, “do you think?”
Kara clears her throat again. “So, you know,” she says, “maybe we should. Go on a date, I mean.”
Lena smiles like a shark, probably. She doesn’t have a mirror right now so she can’t actually see what her smile looks like. But she’s trying for sharklike. “Well, that’s settled, then,” she says. “Pick you up at eight on Friday?”
“Eight,” says Kara. “Yes. Good. Nice round number. Literally. Since it’s…two circles.” Her eyes drift down towards Lena’s general chest area, and she swallows.
Lena raises an eyebrow. This might be easier than she thought.
The plan is to break Kara’s heart. Not immediately, of course. Kara’s done nothing to earn that kind of mercy. No, Lena’s going to bide her time. She’ll have to date Kara for a while. A couple months, at least. And then Lena will drop the other shoe, right onto Kara’s unsuspecting head: it was all a lie. I never loved you. None of it was real.
See how she likes it.
Their first date goes well, or as well as a fake first date that’s part of a complicated revenge scheme can go, anyway. Kara shows up in a button-down shirt and, inexplicably, suspenders, and she does a very admirable job of keeping her eyes north of Lena’s breasts for a solid 85% of the evening.
They have an eerily normal conversation. It’s as if nothing has changed between them at all. As if Kara didn’t lie to Lena’s face for three years straight. As if Lena isn’t lying to Kara now. Somehow, the normalcy makes Lena even angrier.
Kara insists on walking her to her door, even though Lena had been the one to pick her up. “I can fly home,” Kara points out.
“Right,” says Lena with a rictus grin. “Of course.”
She unlocks her door and then, driven by half cold calculation and half wild impulse, grabs Kara by the suspenders and kisses her. Kara responds eagerly. Very eagerly. God, it’s almost too easy.
“Golly,” Kara says when they finally part. Lena runs her finger down Kara’s jaw and stops just above the top button of her shirt.
“Until next time, Supergirl,” she says, and shuts the door behind her.
They announce their relationship at game night after a few more duplicitous dates. J’onn raises his glass in a toast at the news. Nia wolf-whistles. Brainy says, “Mazel tov!” and then, “Did I say that right?”
“Yep,” says Kelly, and leans over to whisper in Lena’s ear, “I want all the details.”
James wraps both of them in a bear-hug, which reminds Lena that he’s caught up in all of this too. Kara’s deception of her has infected every corner of her life, tainted every relationship she’s built in the past few years. None of it can be trusted. Maybe not even Sam and Ruby. Certainly not any of the Superfriends.
Later, when Lena steals a moment away in the kitchen to pour herself another drink, Alex sidles up to her. Lena bristles, preemptively bracing herself against what she assumes must be some sort of shovel talk.
Instead Alex launches into some nonsense that Lena isn’t foolish enough to believe anymore, about how she’d had her memory wiped so that she’d forgotten Kara was Supergirl for a few months (which, yeah right), and how it was hard for her to reconcile the two of them even now. “It’s really amazing how well you took it,” says Alex. “If I were you…well.” She smiles and shakes her head. “My point is…I really admire your capacity for forgiveness.”
Lena smiles and hugs her and spends the next hour fighting the overwhelming urge to throw a drink in her face.
The tricky thing about her plan is figuring out when, exactly, the other shoe should drop. Months pass and no golden opportunity seems to present itself. Lena runs simulation after simulation of the big moment with Hope, but none of them satisfy her. She can’t be sure that Kara’s heart would truly be broken.
Then one day she gets kidnapped on her way to work.
Her kidnappers spirit her away to some obscure mountain hideaway, where they take great pleasure in explaining their plan to her in considerable detail. Lena doesn’t listen to a word of it. She just studies her fingernails and waits for Kara to come.
She doesn’t have to wait for long. Kara crashes inelegantly through the roof and sweeps Lena up into the sky, as efficient as a hand plucking a spider out of a drain and returning it to its web.
Kara sets her down on her balcony, but doesn’t let go, wrapping her in a tight hug. Eventually Lena croaks out, “I’d like to breathe, please,” and Kara releases her, full of apologies. But her hand comes back up to cradle Lena’s chin, and she rests her forehead on Lena’s.
“I love you,” she breathes out.
And this would be the perfect time, Lena knows. She should rip the band-aid off right here, right now. Throw Kara’s love confession back in her face. Make her understand just how meaningless such a confession is in the face of all her lies. And then Lena would finally be free of this relationship for good.
But – “I love you, too,” she says, and kisses her.
Tomorrow would be just as good, really.
She doesn’t do it tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next week.
She thinks about it a lot. But. Well. There’s always something.
Sometimes she’s tired. Sometimes Kara’s tired, or sad, and while Lena is of course mirthless and unyielding in her revenge, she’s not cruel. Besides, she wouldn’t get a proper reaction out of a Kara who was already feeling down. And the reaction is the whole point.
Sometimes there’s a holiday, and, well, that’s just kind of inconvenient, isn’t it? Holidays always require so much planning, even when your fake girlfriend whose heart you intend on breaking can fly anywhere in the world in minutes.
Sometimes there’s a crisis, and it would be terribly selfish to put her revenge before the greater good. Lena knows all about the greater good. It’s the thing you kill brothers for. Compared to that, suffering through her duplicitous relationship for another week or so is small potatoes. Microscopic, even. Subatomic potatoes, fit only for the quantum realm.
And sometimes – well, sometimes, to tell the truth, there’s no reason at all. Lena will look around at her life and realize that there’s nothing holding her back from enacting the final piece of her revenge, and she’ll turn to Kara and open her mouth to bring the hammer down on her lying, traitorous head, and yet somehow the words just won’t seem to come. She’s starting to suspect it’s some kind of medical condition.
Her condition flares up one night when she and Kara are curled up against each other on the couch watching Babe VIII: Go Pig or Go Home. Lena can’t for the life of her understand why the franchise didn’t stop after the second movie, but Kara loves the explosions and the pig-robot transformation sequences.
As the credits roll, Kara lets out a contented sigh. “What a film,” she says, her voice tinged with genuine awe.
Lena doesn’t know why she does it, really. It’s just something about Kara, in this moment, that briefly overwhelms all rational thinking processes. She seems so earnest, so sincerely delighted by the most mundane of porcine popcorn flicks, that it cracks Lena’s heart wide open and spurs her to absolute madness.
(And how ironic, Lena will reflect some nights later, alone on her balcony with only the light pollution of National City for company, how dreadfully, torturously, poetically ironic that after all this time Lena has spent lying and scheming to get back at Kara for her years of deception, she still falls for Kara’s act. Or is it ironic? Lena is slightly drunk and can’t keep her literary devices straight. Maybe it’s just sad.
But that’s still days away. Right now she says – )
“Marry me.”
For someone with superspeed, Kara takes a remarkably long time to turn her head to look at Lena. Eventually she croaks out a, “What?” But it’s not a confused “what,” it’s a “what” said with tears in her eyes, hope in her voice, and the shaky beginnings of a smile on her lying lips.
That, of all things, is what convinces Lena to double down. Because she can use this, oh yes she can.
“Marry me,” she says again. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. So if that’s what you want, too…”
Another pause, and for a brief, terrible moment Lena thinks she’s been made the fool all over again, but then Kara is wrapping her arms around her and laughing and crying and saying something that’s probably “yes” repeatedly into Lena’s shirt. Lena tears up too, but just for dramatic effect. Not because she’s emotionally affected or anything.
“I can’t believe I’m going to get to marry you,” says Kara with a grin as she pulls away.
Lena hums. She can’t quite believe it either. But she sees things clearly now. This is the last piece of the puzzle that her revenge has been missing all along.
“We could even do a Kryptonian ceremony,” she idly muses aloud.
Kara’s eyes grow wide, as if the possibility hadn’t occurred to her, and the lines around her eyes crinkle as she smiles. She leans in close and lands a peck on Lena’s check. “You’re amazing, you know that?” she murmurs.
Lena almost flinches, but sculpts her mouth into a smile just in time. This, in the end, is what she hates Kara for the most: that sometimes she sounds just like Lena’s old best friend, and it makes Lena forget for a second that her best friend never existed at all, and then she remembers, and her heart rips in half anew every time. Kara took Kara from Lena, and that is unforgivable.
“You always know just what to say,” Lena replies, and the words sit heavy on her tongue like lead.
“Before we do this,” Kara says, “you should know that in Kryptonian culture, we don’t believe in divorce.”
“That sounds like a system ripe for abuse,” says Lena without thinking, taking a sip of wine. After a moment she hears what she just said. “I’m sorry, that was…culturally insensitive of me.”
Kara looks at her thoughtfully. “No, you’re right,” she says. “Kryptonian society had its flaws. People need to be able to leave bad situations, especially women.” She pauses. “The reason I bring it up is…I’m not saying you can’t get a divorce from me. With the life you’ve led, I don’t want you to feel trapped ever again. I just mean that, if we go through with this the Kryptonian way, then even if we legally divorce by Earth standards…I wouldn’t ever marry again.”
“Oh,” says Lena, because what else can she say, really? “Um. That’s…”
“Although, in the interest of full disclosure,” says Kara, “that would still be true even if we don’t get married in a Kryptonian ceremony, or even if we never get married at all.” Her eyes meet Lena’s, her gaze steady and sure. “This is it for me.”
Lena flinches. “You can’t know that.”
Kara smiles an enigmatic little smile. “I can and I do,” she says.
Anger rises up within Lena suddenly. At herself, at Kara, at this whole mess she’s gotten herself into. “What if I break your heart?” she challenges Kara, a vindictive edge creeping into her tone. “What if I walk out that door tomorrow? What if I – ” She fishes for a suitably unforgivable action. “What if I murder Brainy?”
Kara blinks. “You won’t murder Brainy,” she says. “You love Brainy.”
I loved Lex, Lena thinks, but she doesn’t say it. Besides, Kara’s right. She won’t murder Brainy.
Kara reaches out and entangles her fingers with Lena’s. “If you’re having second thoughts,” she says, “we don’t have to go through with it. Just because you’re the one who asked doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind.”
Lena almost takes the out Kara is giving her. She should take the out. She knows she should. Involving Kara’s almost-extinct culture in her little revenge plan is probably a step too far.
But. Well. Kara did say Lena was it for her anyway, the damn fool. So she probably wouldn’t get to experience a Kryptonian wedding with anyone else. So in a sense, Lena would be doing her a favor. And what’s one little favor between mortal enemies in a fake relationship?
So, “Okay,” Lena says. “Let’s get married.”
The wedding is bigger than Lena imagined, though thankfully still small enough that she isn’t overwhelmed. She asks Brainy to be the Kryptonian equivalent of her best man (Kara, of course, asks Alex). The request causes him to get all misty-eyed before hastily wiping his eyes and muttering something to himself about her excellent ‘little boxes’ strategy, which is serving her so fantastically well that she’s glad to see Brainy is still using it too.
Both of Kara’s mothers show up on the big day. Alura gifts Lena with a traditional Kryptonian wedding dress for her to wear, its chest adorned with the symbol of the House of El – “for the hero of Argo City, and my daughter’s hero too,” Alura says, which definitely does not make Lena cry.
The Superfriends all come, of course, arrayed in the front row like VIPs at a baseball game. J’onn and M’gann, to Lena’s surprise, clap the loudest, though Nia cheers harder. Kelly outshines the other guests in a gorgeous black-and-gold dress reminiscent of her Guardian suit, while James gifts Kara and Lena with a photo album of the two of them over the years. Winn even drops by from the future to return Kara’s mother’s necklace, which earns him a hug that almost kills him with its force.
Lois and Clark fly in from Metropolis, as do Sam and Ruby, the latter of whom spends the ceremony making goofy faces at young Jonathan. Jess shows up, too, in a dashing outfit that evidences her status as the highest-paid assistant in National City. Lena finds it in her heart to invite Andrea to the wedding as well, mostly to make Kara squirm – though her own eyes do inexplicably moisten a bit when Andrea hugs her tight at the reception afterwards.
Kara’s friends Barry and Iris also make it to the wedding, all the way from an alternate universe. The two of them are kind and friendly, though they do give Lena a very confusing pep talk about lightning rods before the ceremony begins. Lena smiles at them indulgently and makes a mental note to warn Kara that her extradimensional friends might be wrapped up in some kind of lightning-rod pyramid scheme.
Even Lillian comes. She sits next to James and occasionally leans over to whisper in his ear, and from the deer-in-the-headlights look that keeps crossing his face, Lena infers that her mother is probably trying to flirt with him.
Clark is the one who leads Kara and Lena through the ceremony, at Kara’s request. His Kryptonian is rough and unpolished, even compared to Lena’s, but there’s something sincere about it that Lena finds more moving than a correct pronunciation could ever be.
After the ceremony is done, and Lena and Kara are officially married (on two different planets, no less), they’re swarmed by their friends and family, who shower them in well-wishes and try to engage them in all manner of silly dances. Kara happily takes them up on this offer, and Lena laughs and laughs at her wife’s (her wife’s) dance moves. It’s the best day Lena’s had in a very long time, and it’s only later, when the sky is growing dark and the guests are clearing out, that Lena realizes she went the whole wedding without thinking about her revenge at all.
“Do you think we should have kids?” Kara asks one lazy weekend morning, in the middle of reading the paper.
Lena freezes, coffee cup halfway to her mouth.
Kara looks up. “It’s okay if you say no,” she says. “And it’s okay if you say yes. I know we talked about it back when we were dating and we said we should wait and see how we felt in a few years, and, well,” she shrugs, “it’s been a few years.”
Has it really? Lena thinks it over and realizes with a sinking feeling that it has, indeed, been a few years. Her coffee cup is still halfway to her mouth.
“We could get a dog, also,” Kara muses. “Or a cat.” She perks up. “Or a turtle. Do you like turtles? Of course you like turtles. Who doesn’t like turtles?”
“I’ve been lying to you,” says Lena.
Kara blinks at her uncomprehendingly. “You…don’t like turtles?”
Lena ignores this. “I knew who you were before you told me,” she says. Kara’s mouth falls open, ever so slightly. “Lex told me everything right before I killed him.”
Kara blinks again, this time much more rapidly. “Killed him? You didn’t – I killed Lex – ”
“You never found a body,” says Lena tonelessly. She feels as if her soul has departed her body and is on the outside looking in while her empty meatsuit does the talking for her. “I shot him in the chest. And with his dying breath, he told me you were a liar.” She looks Kara right in the eye now. “Our entire relationship was a sham. I only seduced you so I could break your heart. As payback for breaking mine.”
She finally takes a sip of her coffee. Kara watches, disbelieving, and only after many seconds of silence does she seem to understand that Lena is serious.
Kara looks down, her brow furrowing in a crinkle that Lena has an irrational, traitorous urge to smooth over even now, when she’s confessing her greatest deception in response to Kara’s own. “So…you don’t love me?”
The question throws Lena off-balance. “What?” she says, and then, “I mean – well – that is to say, I – ” She flounders, suddenly rudderless at sea. This wasn’t supposed to be quite so difficult. Kara quirks an eyebrow at her hemming and hawing, and that only makes Lena more self-conscious of her inability to answer a simple question. “Well,” she says again, her brow now growing its own crinkle as it occurs to her she may have made a minor miscalculation. “Hm.”
Kara studies her carefully, letting the conversation lapse into an awkward silence. “So,” she says at last, “what part was a deception, exactly?”
Lena sputters. “Wh – all of it,” she says.
“But you love me,” says Kara, testing the waters.
Lena shrugs her shoulders and inclines her head in a vague gesture that could be theoretically interpreted as a yes, if any given non-specific observer really wanted to read it that way.
“And, I mean, you’ve been a great partner to me,” Kara continues. “You’ve supported me. You’ve challenged me. You’ve been…you’ve been my yellow sun. Sometimes literally,” she adds.
Lena does not deign to verbally respond to this obviously nonsensical argument, because to do so honestly would require her to admit that it is not actually nonsensical at all and is, in fact, entirely correct.
Kara regards her with a contemplative eye. “Do you want to break up with me? Is that what you’re saying?”
Lena huffs and crosses her arms. She opens her mouth to say, Yes, obviously, haven’t you been listening? But something about the look on Kara’s face forces the truth right out of her. “Not really,” she mutters, like a child admitting that they don’t truly hate the taste of broccoli after all.
Kara leans back, the crinkle on her forehead relaxing. “Okay then,” she says.
Lena blinks, bewildered. “Okay?” she echoes.
“Okay,” Kara repeats, looking strangely serene.
“Wh – not okay,” Lena insists. “Why aren’t you angry? I’ve just completely torn the rug out from under you. I’ve shown you that your entire world, the whole life you’ve built over the past few years, everything you love and value – all of it was a lie! You can’t trust anything I’ve said for years now. You can’t trust anything at all!”
Kara flinches, and a bleak expression overtakes her face. Lena thinks she’s finally going to get mad at her, but instead Kara asks quietly, “Is that how I made you feel?”
Rage overtakes Lena’s lingering feelings of guilt. “Of course it is,” she snaps. “You were my best friend one moment and then you sent my boyfriend to spy on me the next. You called me a Luthor in your supersuit and then you put on your glasses and play-acted at soothing the wounds you yourself had inflicted. You lied to me literally every time you spoke to me, and you got my entire social circle to lie to me too. Do you have any idea – ” She breaks off, because she’s tearing up, and she doesn’t want Kara to see her cry. Not now, not when she’s finally reached the moment of catharsis, of schadenfreude, that she’s been fantasizing about for years. “Do you have any idea what that did to me?” she says, once her more inconvenient emotions are back inside their designated little boxes.
Kara looks devastated. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I never really thought about it. I was just so glad you forgave me.”
“Well, I didn’t,” says Lena, whose little boxes burst open again, ugly tears now running down her face. “And now I’ve made you fall in love with me and broken your heart, so. What do you think about that?”
Unexpectedly, Kara smiles. Lena feels her hackles rise, anticipating mockery. But Kara just says, “Lena. I was already in love with you. You didn’t make me do anything.”
Lena’s brain does a record-scratch. “What?”
“Plus,” Kara says, “you haven’t done a very good job breaking my heart.”
“I lied to you for years,” Lena protests weakly.
Kara hums. “I’m still not clear on what exactly you were lying to me about,” she says. “I think – and don’t take this the wrong way – but I think maybe you’re kind of…bad at revenge.”
Lena almost argues the point. But what’s the use, really? It’s hard to refute it.
“I’m still so mad at you,” she says, and damn her heart, she starts crying again. “You hurt me so much.”
Kara gets up and, tentatively, wraps her arms around Lena in a hug. “Yeah,” she says. “I think I’m starting to get that.”
“But I don’t want to break up with you,” Lena says into Kara’s shirt. She looks up into Kara’s face and smiles a withering smile, angry with herself and Kara both. “Aren’t I just the world’s biggest fool?”
Kara rests Lena’s head on her shoulder. “No way,” she murmurs. “You’re only 5’5”.”
Despite herself, despite everything, Lena laughs. She pulls back gently from Kara’s embrace. “That’s true,” she says. “You’re a far bigger fool than I.” But she’s smiling when she says it, even with the tear tracks still wet on her face, and Kara, proving her point, smiles back.
They smile at each other like that for some time, twin fools who can’t help but fall for each other’s lies. Eventually Kara exhales and leans against the kitchen counter, the air in front of her mouth frosting a little with cold. “So,” she says.
“So,” Lena echoes.
“Is that a no on the turtle?”
And damn it all, Lena really does love her.